Modeling Goats for the Men Who Stare at Goats

The pivotal scene of “Men Who Stare At Goats” consists of a simple goat that seemingly dies from the menacing stare of George Clooney, using the power of his mind to stop the goat’s heart.  The final shot consisted of a CG goat that had to seamless transition between the live action goat, but react realistically.  CIS Hollywood talks about how they created this scene.

The digital goat was modeled and rigged in Maya. Explained Henke, “we posed the rig of the goat in the plate and further tweaked the model to match the live action goat. In addition we scanned the surrounding shots and lined up 3D cameras to gauge the model’s proportions from different views – we didn’t want to end up faking a part of the anatomy that matched the fore-shortening of the goat standing but became unappealing when the goat fell down.”

via CGSociety – Men Who Stare at Goats.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

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